Doppelgänger in the Epitaph

This film is of the kind that you want to talk about a million things but don’t know where to start, fearing you would over-emphasize one aspect and neglect the rest. But here it is, the Doppelgänger.

Doppelgänger refers to the double, an imitation/reflection of a person or sometimes, a repeted scenario. This film, if anything, creates tension through emphasizing the dopplegänger (of characters) and as a genre, reflects itself as a mock imitation of life, which again is a dopplegänger.

It seems that most characters in the film lead a double life – having two names, fluent in two languages, dress under the influence of Westernized Japanese style – a typical phenomenon in colonized Korea. I was baffled, even – is the officer Japanese who’s fluent in Korean or a Korean native working for the Japanese army – because they just appear so natural, so oblivious (doctor calling a Korean girl Asako without feeling alienated) that it starts to become uncanny. Is it possible then, being colonized, this sample of Koreans working in the war hospital could be this adaptive of a new identity. The director purposely distances himself from the sensitive and instead focusing on the alternative narration, a horror story retold. (Interestingly enough, the film never reveals who are the real patients in Ansen hospital, Japanese soldiers or Korean civilians)

Then it constantly reflects itself as a genre, especially of the frame within the frame. The film starts by starting a film – a mock reflection – and during the narration the montage being constantly modified and detailed, a memory refreshed, even. And again, at 38:51 Asako and her mother standing in the hospital corridor becomes a frame inside of a bigger frame of snowed forest – a transgression of time and space. One of the key characteristics of the dopplegänger is the self-observation outside one’s body, being a bystander, a third-party; in this film the effect is achieved by the consistent usage of the mirror, the portrait, and remarkably, a split personality. Yet isn’t it what the film as a genre is about? An imitation, engagement and observation of life.

It is impossible to discuss this film without mentioning the Japanese colonization: during this time hundreds of young students like Kim Donwon couple were sent to study in Japan and they brought back new technology, ideology and “modernity”. Chandan Reddy in his essay on this concept argues that modernity is the end point of colonial rule (Reddy, p.160), which entails “violence, destruction and privation. (p.163)” Even now there is an ambivalent attitude embedded in the Korean mentality towards Japan: surely war as a direct agent accelerated the rate of South Korea’s “modernization” as a byproduct and Japan, in recent years particularly, becomes a role model of popular culture and entertainment industry, yet the blister from the history and of the history is hardly reconciled. (An observation: increasingly Korean filmmakers start to adopt and incorporate Japanese aesthetics into their works; does the director elaborate this overdose of Japaneseness for the movie’s sake or was he simply following the trend – blood in the snow and the butterflies have become insipid stereotypes, really.)

Anyway, back to the dopplegängers. Three stories, each character alive bears another person’s death: the deceased could continue to exist through/with the living, even. People who have survived are accompanied, reminded, haunted by the death – the ghost of history. The metaphors in the decadence of Ansen hospital and lightened candles become just too familiar: a prosepct of looking back and passing on. Yet I think the title unveils the true sentiment of the storyteller: a past burderned with too much humilation and myths that could only be rendered as a “gidam”.